‘I noticed she had listed three options. To hurt her. To get her attention. To make a point. I remembered learning about the rule of three at school, and I realised that it was probably a universal thing – or maybe she only used three examples when she spoke English.’
New fiction by Kieran Wyatt.
‘When you are unhappy wherever you go, the common denominator is you, Teddy’s ex-girlfriend told him, with a cruelty so uncharacteristic as to be true.’
New fiction by Sheila Armstrong.
‘In A Woman’s Story, Ernaux more than fills de Beauvoir’s feminist and existentialist shoes. And as the family’s ‘archivist’, she is every bit the dutiful daughter.’
Lucy Thynne on Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story.
‘The demands of the male observer are hidden, his words never breaking through from the silent ubiquity of their god complex.’
Elliot C. Mason reviews Rachael Allen’s God Complex.
‘All at once, it felt nihilistic and misguided. I had been on this extended fast, but it was devoted to absent men and not any real god. As such, there had been no revelation or resolution, no peace.’
Christiana Spens on Lent.
‘So what is the power of literary fashion, then? For me it lies in its virtuality, that imaginary quality of the ekphrastic, something so beautiful that it cannot exist in real life as we know it on the page. That virtuality also ties into the codification of clothing, and how it might suggest something about its wearer without saying as much.’
Katie Tobin on the Bloomsbury Group and fashion.
‘When we confess, we spit something out, something previously secret and slippery, something summoned up from deep inside.’
Jennifer Jasmine White reviews 52 Monologues at the Soho Theatre.
‘She was so very, very fortunate, yes, she was.’
New fiction by Jane Messer.
‘For several long minutes, nothing changed. We seemed to be opposite and equal forces.’
New fiction by Laura Shaine Cunningham.
‘I knew that the building had been turned into a block of luxury condos and bore no internal resemblance to the halls my favourite writers would have walked; and I knew it hardly mattered either way, that I could have curled up in Sylvia Plath’s unwashed sheets and it wouldn’t make me a better writer.’
New fiction by Gráinne O’Hare.
‘Seen from the other side of the Irish Sea, this looks like a courageous act, and one to wish for more often in English fiction.’
Guy Stagg reviews Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses.
‘I had to find my own distance from the material I was writing, particularly because it was so close to my own experience. In the early stages of composition, I was almost bogged down by it. I didn’t know how to step back.’
Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year shortlistee Michael Magee on his debut novel, Close to Home.
‘I have been searching for the word to describe the feeling of wanting big things, a hunger that grows and surpasses what I have inherited.’
New fiction by Jimin Kang.
‘In other words, there is a love that waits, and it has been and is being published in Latvia – as well as elsewhere – right now, before our eyes.’
Ivars Šteinbergs on Latvian poetry.
‘Then I told him he looked like a lop-sided Trent Reznor and didn’t he want to kiss me? This is a kind of flirting. This has never not worked.’
Fiction by Sarah Fletcher.
‘Whilst his subjects range widely, Hardy’s style is constant. Even in the theatre of war, he managed to keep his frame still.’
Henry Roberts reviews Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War at the Photographers’ Gallery.
‘If the meaning of a poem is obvious without breaking scrolling pace, then a core aspect of the form has been lost.’
Lee Hatsumi Mayer on the Romantic poets today.
‘She was going to have a large life, an important life. She could feel it.’
Fiction by Hadley Franklin, winner of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize 2023.
‘Then as I was writing I was drawing this Exodus-like pillar of cloud, this memory of my brother, out of the dreamscape, out of the fog of the morning.’
Thomas Gardner on the new Daunt Books Publishing edition of his collection, Poverty Creek Journal.
‘As an artist, I’m an observer. My role is to alert and call to attention, not write policy. My sensibility is such that I experience the world intensely and recreate it in a visual form. But to try and answer this impossible question, one of such complexity, rooted in history and human avarice, a plan of correction would take time, which we don’t have, and a concerted effort, which we don’t have.’
Charlotte Hopkins Hall on her forthcoming show at Gallery 46.
‘“It’s your birthday tomorrow,” said my mother. “Did you know the Jesuits say ‘Give me a child before the age of seven and he’ll be mine forever?’” “Who are the Jesuits?” “Priests.” “Oh.” She tousled my hair. “Thank god you’ve met none.”’
New fiction by Jago Rackham.
‘A lot of horror films trade in Christian symbols and ideas – demons, upside down crucifixes and so on. Jewish folklore is just as stuffed with goblins and witches and ghosts – all manner of fun things to play around with. So why shouldn’t they play a part in my modern Jewish novel?’
Toby Lloyd on his debut novel, Fervour.
‘Of justices, karma is the most poetic— / a magistrate who makes us wear / our wrongs: albatrosses, ugly charms.’
New poetry by Jane Zwart.
‘Both contemporary pieces seek to build on this revolutionary choreography rather than imitate it perfectly, yet both acknowledge that Nijinska’s work marked key developments in the world of choreography, bridging the gap between one century and the next in the world of classical dance. So how did it come to pass that now she is known primarily as a keeper of her brother’s career?’
Esmee Wright on Bronislava Nijinska.
